Survey Asks About Sci-Hub, ResearchGate, Video Discovery

Here are some factoids about scholarly publishing you might not know: Google Scholar is used more than plain old Google by scholars (but yes, Google use wins out everywhere else). Despite the explosive growth of smartphones, access to scholarly content by mobile phone accounts for only about 10 percent of use. And while abstracting and indexing services are declining, they remain the most important starting point for scholarly search.

How do we know these things? Because you told us.

Since 2004, Renew Publishing Consultants has surveyed researchers, students, teachers, lecturers, professors, journalists, managers, clinicians, medics, librarians, government officials, and engineers, working across all sectors and in all regions to learn about the uptake of academic content. Their last survey carried out by researchers Tracy Gardner and Simon Inger was in 2015, and this year they are hosting a fifth survey.

The 2015 research focused on journal and book content discovery. In the end there were more than 40,000 respondents, and the effort was supported by academic publishers (including SAGE, the parent of Social Science Space), societies, and intermediaries. The latest research will take on the very contentious issue of measuring perceptions of Sci-Hub and ResearchGate in discovery and delivery, and will also ask about how readers discover academic video content.

“Discovery,” said Inger, “is still one of the major issues facing the research community. Key to overcoming some of the challenges we face is understanding in detail how readers discover academic content.”

So far, according to Renew, 13 organizations have agreed to assist the effort. “We are delighted there has been such a lot of interest in our research,” said Gardner. “We have welcomed back a number of publishers who supported our previous work but are also looking forward to working with publishers who haven’t been involved before. We would not be able to carry out this work without their support.” There is still time to get involved if you would like to take part; click here or contact simon@renewconsultants.com or tracy@renewconsultants.com for more information.

The resulting research report and the research data will be freely available at the completion. The 2015 report is published under a CC-BY NC license and can be downloaded from here.

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